Sydney Towle, TikTok Cancer Advocate With More Than 1 Million Followers, Dies at 26
Sydney Towle, a social media memoirist who built an audience of more than a million followers while documenting her life with cancer, died Wednesday at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. She was 26.
Sydney Towle, a social media memoirist who challenged assumptions about living with cancer, has died at 26 from complications of metastatic bile duct cancer.
Monica Schipper/Getty Images for The Business of Fashion
Her death was caused by complications of metastatic bile duct cancer and was announced through her social media channels. Earlier in the week, her family said she had entered hospice care.
Sydney Towle Turned Her Cancer Journey Into a Public Story
In 2023, Towle was living in Los Angeles after graduating from Dartmouth. She worked remotely in marketing, surfed, posted bikini selfies and shared dance-trend videos online. That changed after a bulge and burning sensation in her belly sent her to urgent care, where she was soon diagnosed with cholangiocarcinoma, a rare cancer of the bile ducts.
Rather than allowing the diagnosis to define every aspect of her life, Towle began documenting what it meant to be a young woman living with cancer. Her audience eventually grew to more than a million followers.
Her videos included hiking in Spain, sharing feelings of loneliness and wrapping her head in ice packs with her mother to help prevent hair loss from chemotherapy.
Towle continued seeking enriching experiences while navigating a deadly illness. After undergoing surgery to remove her gall bladder and part of her liver, she received approval from a doctor and left for a solo adventure in Europe. She documented the experience along the way.
Her growing platform also became a way to challenge assumptions about how people with serious illnesses should look and live.
“Syd had a keen sense of how sharing her life could help others, and she used that to promote understanding of young adults facing cancer, the importance of research funding and the beauty of living life in the moment,” Melinda Bachini, the chief patient officer of the Cholangiocarcinoma Foundation, said in an interview.
A Different Face of CancerTok
Towle's content often mixed ordinary pleasures with the realities of treatment. In one video posted last year, she danced in her apartment while a message appeared across the screen:
“Go get a pint of Ben and Jerry’s, watch your favorite movie, remember that life is good and bad things happen sometimes but that doesn’t make it a bad life.”
Her presence online represented an emerging face of cancer: someone younger than expected, reasonably upbeat despite a dire diagnosis, and still able and eager to experience ordinary life between treatments and hospitalizations.
More than many others on “CancerTok,” Towle combined lifestyle videos, including “get ready with me” and fashion “haul” content, with moments from the chemotherapy bay. She could appear beside an IV pole and a vomit bag while a trending hip-hop song played.
At the same time, she spoke openly about the emotional toll of fighting for her life while many of her peers were building theirs. Dating, she explained in a melancholy post, was out of reach.
“How do you make small talk about what you’ve been up to,” she said in one video, “when what you’ve been up to is going to chemotherapy?”
Online Harassment and Conspiracy Claims
In fall 2024, after the cancer returned in her liver, Towle moved to New York City for treatment at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. She marked the move with a video of herself cheerfully dancing on a city street while Taylor Swift’s “Welcome to New York” played.
Around the same time, online trolls gathered on Reddit to scrutinize her posts, including her words, mood, clothing, hair and signs of illness.
“Does something feel off to you about Syd Towle’s cancer story?” one prolific poster wrote.
“We have receipts, medical analysis, fact-checking and discussions,” the anonymous poster added, urging people to “join the conversation and tell us how you found us and why you may have doubts.”
The Reddit posters claimed they were trying to expose what they believed was a giant fraud. They questioned medical details Towle had shared online, identified what they considered “evidence” of a conspiracy and mocked her actions. Some contacted brands with which she had deals and urged them to drop her. Someone using an anonymous email account also contacted her medical providers.
“I literally feel like punching her in the face,” one commenter wrote.
The accusations and harassment tormented Towle, but she never publicly engaged with the conspiracy theorists. Instead, she continued making the videos that had become an emotional lifeline.
Her story, including the online abuse she experienced, was chronicled in a front-page article in The New York Times in May 2025.
“I’m sorry that they are so angry that living with cancer can look different than they think it should,” she said.
Sydney Towle's Life and Legacy
Sydney Elizabeth Towle was born on Nov. 15, 1999, in Newburyport, Mass., to Elizabeth Morrow and Philip Towle. She grew up in Hobe Sound, Fla.
At Dartmouth, she majored in government and environmental studies and graduated in 2022.
Her father died in 2016. She is survived by her mother and her brother, Austin.
“She put herself in front of the camera at the most difficult time in her life and told people that it’s OK not to be OK,” her brother said in an interview. “As she said so many times, ‘You’ve got to just keep swimming.’”
Even after her recurrence led her to move to the East Coast, Towle looked for something positive in the change.
“I’ve always wanted to live in New York City,” she said in a video, “and life is short, as I’m constantly reminded.”
Although she was heavy-hearted about leaving the friends she had made in Los Angeles, she also recognized what that sadness meant.
“I was just thinking,” she said, “about that quote: ‘How lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.’”
